Gingrich: “Won’t Anybody Please Think of the Children?”

Democrats are really good with sob stories. That’s not to say that there aren’t horror stories with people’s health care, which is why regardless of what President Obama wants you to believe, conservatives don’t think the status quo is acceptable either. But for every story aboot how the health care industry has failed someone, there’s another where it hasn’t.

There’s a story aboot a woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her personal physician got her an appointment with a specialist right away, and they settle on an experimental treatment designed to cure her of cancer. Ten years later, she’s still cancer free. None of that may have been possible if the Democrats got to live out their soggy dreams of a single-payer system where the government is in full control.

A 3-year-old boy was recently diagnosed with a rare, aggressive, soft-tissue cancer in his bladder. Radiation treatment would have stunted the growth of his pelvic bones, hips and bladder and left him disabled. Radical surgery could remove his bladder, prostate and portions of his rectum. That would have left him impotent, using a colostomy bag, and urinating through another bag in his abdomen. His parents chose a third option—a new “unproven” therapy where a proton beam precisely targeted the radiation dose so that it didn’t cripple their son for life. The boy is now cancer-free and his body functions normally. This story would seem to be an example of our health-care system at its best. But it is incompatible with the left’s vision for overhauling the health-care industry.

Despite all the well-documented problems with our health-care system, the United States is still the world’s leading source of medical innovation. Since 1960, the U.S. age-adjusted death rate for heart disease has declined by 54% due to advancing technology and new drugs. Pacemakers have been transformed. They once required a user to wear a backpack to monitor the device’s short battery life. Today, pacemaker batteries last more than seven years and are small enough to install in the rib-cage muscle wall.

Standing in opposition to this world of hope is the vision of reform advanced by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. That vision would destroy the economic incentives that drive health-care innovation because it starts with a fundamental conceit: that government planners can spend health-care dollars better than patients and doctors in the marketplace. This planning is the foundation for the arbitrary insistence that spending 17% of our GDP on health care is “too much.” The new bureaucracies that would be set up to reduce health-care spending by slashing payments to doctors, hospitals, surgeons, specialists, drug companies, high-tech equipment makers and others will kill the innovation that has served us so well. The essential incentives for the huge capital investment necessary to develop breakthrough treatments will be gone. And so too will high-paying jobs that these investments create.

Something to remember the next time the Democrats use their politics of fear to manipulate and scare you into believing the health care industry is evil, or the insurance industry is evil, or the doctors removing tonsils that don’t need to be removed are evil…basically, manipulate you into thinking everyone is evil and corrupt, and you can’t possibly survive without them. Oh, and that tens of thousands more are going to die. That’s my personally favourite.

When the Democrats use their politics of fear, just think of the children like this 3-year-old boy.